An optimistic yet realistic look at the problems and possibilities of global food production.
Canadian journalist and college instructor Boyle’s nonfiction work seeks a way to combat climate change by taking a lesson from European history.
The first half of this book delineates the United Kingdom’s approach to food-supply problems during the turbulent years leading up to and during the Second World War. At the time, the U.K. depended greatly on food importation, which would certainly be threatened by a military conflict. Led by Lord Woolton, the newly appointed Minister of Food, the government instigated a bold campaign to change citizens’ expectations and approaches to farming and eating. A rationing system was implemented, and government intervention aimed to make agricultural practices more productive. The government also made use of the media to encourage more food production in home gardens or allotments and discourage food waste, among other actions. Interestingly, despite the restrictions, this system resulted in better nutrition for poorer people in the nation and led to an overall healthier citizenry with better morale. Boyle argues that our modern war is against climate change, to which our current food production system contributes. In order to face this threat, she asserts, humankind must “fundamentally change the way we grow and consume food.” She talks about current projects and programs that are making positive change, such as private companies committing to ethically sourced produce, apps for finding farmers markets, and farmers and ranchers aiming to “produce healthy food that is affordable and kinder to animals, local environments, and climate.” In this informative book, Boyle effectively outlines applicable lessons from the U.K.’s WWII–era food-supply approach to problems of today, noting that change can occur in systems as well as individual choices; that strong public leadership is a necessity; and that nations need to come together in common cause. Overall, this thoroughly researched and referenced book is compelling, and many readers’ eyes will be opened to a large-scale problem and the potential for addressing it through concerted, deliberate action. Throughout, Boyle argues her points convincingly, and many will find a sense of hope in her ideas.
An optimistic yet realistic look at the problems and possibilities of global food production.Pub Date: April 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-912367-0
Page Count: 294
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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